Tag Archives: C.S. Lewis

My Tuesday morning walk to work kept me more in my head than usual. As I stomped along, half listening to Rowan Williams (former Archbishop of Canterbury) gently drone on about the Chronicals of Narnia and how Aslan is an unpredictable, un-tamed lion, my mind wondered about the details of the coming day, both practical and existential: How would I meet a publishing deadline? How would I manage my typical work duties with a day-long trip to Hartford thrown in for good measure?

And most importantly, how would I get through this season of change? Yale’s graduation is only two months away, and when it comes, I shall have to say goodbye to people I deeply care about. I don’t want them to go. I selfishly want them to stay, to continue being part of this quirky, intellectual town and my life. I’m not ready to say goodbye. I don’t ever want to say goodbye.

And that’s when I felt an overwhelming need to look above me. There soared a hawk, white and gold in the morning light. It circled overhead and finally perched on the top of a church, a few feet from an empty crucifix.

I again thought of Aslan. Rowan Williams was right, Aslan is not a tame lion—you never know what he will next do. And so it is with life. Daily, we must stare into the unknown. Anything could happen, but you must trust, you must rise above the unsettling details, only if for a moment, and search for the longer, wider scope of your narrative. For no life is measured by a single group of details, it is measured by the whole of them.

One of my first Christmas gifts came earlier this week. After a lively lunch, a dear friend of mine handed me a long, cardboard tube.

“I had to give you your Christmas present today,” she said. “You’ll see why when you get home.”

And I did.

Rolled up inside the tube were six sheets of paper, lined with the images of colorful, gilded book bindings—lovely antique visions from the Bodleian Library’s Christmas Book Collection. My friend was right, she had to give me my Christmas present early. As a librarian with a deep partiality for exquisite, old books, how could I wrap my Christmas presents for family and friends in anything else?

I delightedly texted my friend, thanking her for her thoughtfulness. As I hit send, I reflected on just how wonderful a gift it was. Gifts can be rather singular and rather private in nature. A gift passes from you to a friend. If your friend likes it, or even if she does not, your gift will spend the rest of its existence inside your friend’s home, visible to only those your friend permits over her dwelling’s threshold. But that is not how wrapping paper works. It longs to know not just one of your friends, but all of them, as well as your family and co-workers. It wants to chat with others, rather loudly, about the nature of your friendship with the friend who gave you the paper in the first place. For each object that you wrap with the jolly print, becomes an introduction to your other friend when the receiver exclaims: “What lovely paper!” You can then reply: “Thank you, my friend Sally got it for me. She’s also a librarian. You really must meet someday, I think you two would get on well.”

The gift under the paper may be singular, but the wrapping paper wants to be everybody’s friend and happily wishes that everybody else also wants to be friends with each other. As I hope C.S. Lewis would quip, if he had written The Four Gifts rather than The FourLoves—wrapping paper is the least jealous of the gifts, always ready to extend its cheer and warmth to all.

What a fine way to introduce the wrapping paper giver to others I admire and love. And, what a fine way to start the Christmas season.